Friday, December 23, 2011

The Semester Goes Out Not With a Bang, But With a Whimper

I was just commenting to the Unknown Wife how this semester was ending going so well compared to previous ones - my student managed investment fund presentation was done a day earlier than usual, my principles class was ahead of schedule, and my exams were at the beginning of exam period rather than near the end.

I should have known - never say things like that. Even in jest.

It angers Academia - the patron goddess of all professors (also known as "she who makes professors' work go pear-shaped at the worst possible time")

So, what happens? I was cutting and pasting items from the grades spreadsheet for my principles class (it has four components, all on separate tabs of the worksheet). Somehow, I not only deleted the grades for all three exams, I copied the sheet to a file name that overwrote the backup (I always save the spreadsheet to a new file name after each update). After searching for over an hour, I finally found an email backup copy I'd made that had everything but the final exam grades.

The morals of the story:

Make multiple backups of your grading spreadsheet (and anything else of critical importance) every time you change it.

Never, ever say "things are going well this semester". It angers Academia (and she is a vindictive "rhymes with witch").

On a more pleasant note, a couple of bright spots this week:

looks like I'll have a paper submitted within a couple of days. It won't get looked at by the journal editor for a couple of weeks due to the holiday, but it'll be off my desk. Since (as my coauthor says) "if we don't submit this one soon, we'd better start saving for its college education", that's a good feeling.

A coauthor informed me that she had a revise and resubmit that requires her to do some tests that she could do herself, but would rather outsource. Since I can easily do it with a week's work or so, she asked me to be a coauthor. So, for a bit of work, it looks like I will likely have another hit.

We've been making do at the Unknown Household with a seven-year old TV (an old cathode-ray model). We just got our new TV stand (a very nice corner model) and will shortly be getting a new 46 inch flat panel model. Ah, the Kingdom of Thingdom has a new subject.

In any event, here's wishing a Merry Christmas (or whatever else you choose to celebrate this time of year) to all my readers (all three of them).

It's finally feeling like Christmas in the Unknown Household - we've got Christmas songs playing on the radio, Winnie the Pooh (the Unknown Son's (a.k.a. Knucklehead's) recent fascination) on TV, and I'm in the middle of making up a quadruple batch of pumpkin soup on the stove A double batch will be for our neighborhood party tonight and another is for the big family get-together at our place on Christmas Day. So the place sounds and smells like Christmas.